Goldman Sachs Leads $38M Investment in Cloud Storage Firm Nasuni

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Cloud data storage company Nasuni has padded its war chest with a $38 million growth equity investment led by a Goldman Sachs fund.

The new funding brings the Boston-based company’s total venture capital haul to about $120 million since it was founded in 2009. Nasuni last raised money in December 2016, a $25 million combination of equity and debt financing.

The company wasn’t intending to raise more capital until later this year or early 2018, says president Paul Flanagan in an e-mail to Xconomy. But plans changed, he says, after Nasuni’s business momentum grew and it added to its management team—including hiring Flanagan (pictured above), who previously invested in Nasuni when he was at Sigma Prime Ventures and Sigma Partners.

Nasuni has nearly doubled its revenues in each of the past four years, and is on track to do so again this year, Flanagan says. (Nasuni is privately held, so it doesn’t share specific revenue figures.)

“This growth has been driven in part by more enterprises thinking cloud-first when they consider their IT infrastructure needs,” he says. “Additionally, our cloud partners are putting more emphasis on moving data out of the data center and into the cloud. Things seem to be lining up” for Nasuni, he adds.

The company says it will pour the new funds into research and development, marketing initiatives, and supporting customers. It will also grow its 125-person staff by about 40 percent, Flanagan says.

Nasuni told Xconomy in December that it was aiming to break even on cash flow in 2018. That’s still the timeline, Flanagan says.

Nasuni seems like an IPO candidate, given how much it has raised from investors, its revenue growth, and the fact that its latest backer is a giant Wall Street bank. But Flanagan says Nasuni has “no plans for an IPO at the current time.”

The catalyst for Nasuni’s growth seems to be that businesses, particularly large enterprises, are accumulating humongous amounts of data and looking for ways to store, manage, and protect that deluge of information in cheaper and more efficient ways. Nasuni is part of a movement toward cloud storage technologies that has gained traction over the past few years.

Nasuni’s technology handles cloud file storage, online backup, data management, disaster recovery, and other services. It’s aimed at distributed enterprises that have offices in various locations. The software stores all of a customer’s files in the cloud (with partners like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Dell EMC), but it also keeps copies of active files cached to a local storage system so they can be accessed quickly and securely.

Nasuni says it has hundreds of customers, including global corporations like Caterpillar and Siemens. Other related companies in cloud storage and disaster recovery include Carbonite, Datto, Dell EMC, StoneFly, and Quantum.